In recent years, small-sized lightweight electronic equipment has been under active development. A liquid crystal display device mounted as a display device in such electronic equipment has been required to consume low electric power. As one of drive methods for reducing power consumption of the liquid crystal display device, there is a drive method called “pause drive” in which a scanning period for scanning scanning lines to refresh a screen is provided and then a pause period (non-refresh period) for bringing all scanning lines into a non-scanning state to make a refresh pause is provided. In this drive method, a controlling signal or the like is not given to a scanning line drive circuit and/or a signal line drive circuit in the pause period. Hence it is possible to make pause operations of the scanning line drive circuit and/or the data signal line drive circuit, so as to attain low power consumption of the liquid crystal display device. Such pause drive is also referred to as “low-frequency drive” or “intermittent drive”.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-78124 discloses that an operation of a clock signal generation circuit which generates a clock signal for taking a data signal into a signal line is halted, thereby reducing consumption power in a pause period.